Army girl ‘was raped by two corporals after mess bar binge’
A SOLDIER was found crying in the corridor of her barracks wearing only a cardigan after being raped by two corporals, a military court heard yesterday.
Corporal Anne-Marie Ellement, who died two years later, was allegedly attacked by Thomas Fulton and Jeremy Jones after drinking heavily with the pair.
The men, who have since left the Army, admit they had sex with her in their barracks but claim she consented.
Sarah Whitehouse QC, prosecuting, told a panel of Army officers and civil servants deciding the men’s fate that the circumstances of Cpl Ellement’s death in 2011 were ‘not relevant’ to their task. A video recording of testimony Cpl Ellement gave a military policeman the day after the alleged rape in November 2009 was played to the court on the opening day of the trial, which was attended by her mother and two sisters.
Cpl Ellement, from Bournemouth, was 28years-old at the time, Bulford Military Court in Wiltshire heard. During a lock-in at the mess bar in the barracks, Fulton repeatedly suggested they should have a threesome and Jones simulated having sex with Cpl Ellement, it was alleged.
The three corporals in the Royal Military Police then stumbled to Jones’s room at Sennelager Barracks in Germany.
Fulton pulled off Cpl Ellement’s clothes and raped her before Jones did the same, the court was told. In her testimony she said: ‘I remember Tom was on top of me and I was saying to him, “No, it’s hurting. It’s really, really hurting.”
‘When I said no he was just laughing, smiling, like he thought everything was a joke. I was trying to get up but he pinned me down. I was trying to push him off with my hand. I know I didn’t want to have sex with him.
‘The last thing I remember is Jez grabbing my chest and then I have a memory blank.’ She was found by a colleague in the corridor of her apartment block in the early hours, the court heard.
She added: ‘I don’t know how I got home. I don’t know how I came back naked, I had no clothes other than a jumper.
‘I don’t even remember how I got into the building. There’s no way I would run across camp naked.
‘For me to run out of a room naked something’s got to have happened for me to do that, but I don’t remember exactly.’
Witnesses told police the two defendants were flirting with her in the bar, with Fulton caressing her stomach as she sat between
‘I was trying to push him off’
Jones’s legs. She allegedly told them she would have a threesome with them, but she did not want to upset Fulton’s girlfriend Corporal Sarah Noteyoung, who was at a funeral in England. The following day she told police she thought it had all been banter and she ‘would never do that’.
By the end of the evening Cpl Ellement had had eight drinks, including a ‘potent’ Red Bull cocktail which contained four or five shots of vodka and two shots of a blue spirit. The court heard that when she was found she appeared extremely drunk.
Miss Whitehouse said: ‘The first thing she said was, “I didn’t want to and then he did have sex with me”.’
The prosecutor said there was no doubt sex had taken place, but added: ‘Did Miss Ellement consent or was she so drunk that she couldn’t give meaningful consent?’
Fulton and Jones, both 28, both face two counts of rape which they deny.
The trial continues.